


Give him Love

by Cartonsofcartoons



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, I write too many Time travel fics tbh, M/M, Merope raises Tom, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-01-12 19:19:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18452966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cartonsofcartoons/pseuds/Cartonsofcartoons
Summary: Ron lit up in glee at the thought of knowing something Hermione that didn’t. “Amordeditia. What they give all babies born under an Amortentia.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Here’s my logic, Amortentia is not a newly invented potion like Wolfsbane, and it is one that simulates romantic love. Tom cannot possibly be the only child born of it and if people as affection-starved as Merope are the ones having the kids, they would definitely want their children to love them as well. As per my head canon, one such person created the counter, et voila.  
> Tom will be fairly OOC in this story but to be honest, most fanfic characterisations of him are, especially if we take Rowling at her word about the Amortentia making him unable to experience or accept love.

 

It started in a weird combination of the way Harry’s adventures always started. One way his adventures started, was the Dark Lord who had decided to make him his rival.The second way his adventures started, was Ron and Hermione.

 

So, it started in their eight year at Hogwarts where Ron had taken up Muggle studies for fun and applied the things he’d learnt there to the Wizarding world.

 

See, he had just found out about the internet and had been observing people having debates about baby Hitler and the killing of him. Ron wondered out loud in front of Hermione if someone would go back in time and do that to Voldemort and Hermione got pissed off.

 

“The debate is not about killing baby Hitler, it’s about female reproductive rights being thwarted! Besides, Hitler didn’t exist in a vacuum, if it wasn’t him it would be someone else persecuting some group they wanted to.”

 

“Ok, but you don’t even need to kill Riddle, just give him the Amordeditia.”

 

“The what?”

 

Ron lit up in glee at the thought of knowing something Hermione that didn’t. “Amordeditia. What they give all babies born under an Amortentia.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“St Mungo’s can detect if Amortentia was used in the creation of a child. If it was, then the baby can’t  accept love, even when it is given to them, or feel it at all. So they are given Amordeditia for seven days to correct it. But it can only be given in the first year of birth. It’s why a lot of the old Pureblood families have home births. Once it’s found a child is born under Amortentia, the Aurors investigate. Amordeditia isn’t difficult to make anyway.”

 

Harry’s mind was blown. But it was already too little too late. Why hadn’t Merope thought of this before?

 

It becomes a thought, stuck in the back of his head. Not a big deal really, mind blowing, sure, but who could even do that, mess with time like that? It went against everything they’d ever been told.

 

* * *

 

In the end, the thought becomes a nagging thing, tugging at his mind every so often. It came back when he went to another funeral, it came back when it was Halloween, it came back when people refused to let their children play with Teddy because of his werewolf heritage and again and again, until it overwhelmed him. He buried himself in the books in the Black library, used every resource available to him as the Saviour to get access to the Department of Mysteries and finally managed to land himself in muggle London in 1926.    

 

Usually, Harry didn’t like to play pretend. Playing pretend was for when he was with the Dursleys, pretending that he was full and not starving, or pretending that he didn’t hate Petunia and so on and so forth. It was not for when he was  a wizard. He  _ hated  _ acting like someone else with everything in him, but....he was very good at it. And well, bad times called for all sorts of skills. Planning ahead, having a story ready and so on and so forth. He spent ages doing research, stalking a few select people in his animagus form of a merlin. This was important and he needed to do it right. He had his plan in place and with a moue of distaste he prepared to slip into the role he had written himself.

 

He’d stunned Caractacus Burke, and glamoured himself into an unremarkable man, easily forgotten. When Merope comes in, desperate to pawn off her belongings Harry is waiting.

 

“If I were to sell everything in this entire shop, I still wouldn’t be able to offer you what that necklace is worth.” He tells her gently. Her face crumples and Harry quickly follows it up, “I’ll make you a deal. I know someone who owes me a favour and they have a house that you can stay at for the time being at least. I’ll keep the locket as a deposit of sorts and if I ever find a buyer who can give me it’s full price I’ll give you 80 percent of what it makes.”

 

Harry was hoping beyond all hope that his Plan A worked out. It was a simple enough thing, he was hoping to get Merope mentally well enough, that she wouldn’t just give up on life altogether. He had the Amordeditia ready anyhow but if Merope lived, if she felt like it was her responsibility to give the potion to her son and she wanted to brew the potion for the same, she could do so. And then maybe she could raise him as well, maybe Tom would be Tom for longer if he wasn’t in the muggle world, maybe he wouldn’t insist on becoming Voldemort.

 

* * *

 

He visited Merope when he knew there is only a day for Tom to be born, wanting to check up on her. The house he had rented out for the next few months and told her was a friends’ was a magical home. Small but stocked well, with a garden out in the back. 

 

Harry found her in a state far better than expected. When he knocked on the door he had been terribly afraid of what he’d find, but she answers the door, all but beaming. Even in the pensieve memories he’d seen of her before she had never seemed this well. The thin face had a bit of colour to it and she ushered him in, only to excuse herself for a bit. 

 

“I’m sorry, the potion was at a sensitive stage.” She said, breathless.

 

“Should you be brewing potions this advanced into your pregnancy?” He asked. He was hoping against all hope it wasn’t just some more amortentia she’d cooked up to feed Tom Riddle Snr again.

 

Merope flushed, “I-I did something that I shouldn’t have and I really need to correct it. It’s for my baby.” She said and her fingers twisted. Harry was glad for what he was hearing, figuring it was Amordeditia but wanting to help anyway.

 

“Is there anything I can help with?”

 

“N-No. Umm, do you need the house to be emptied?” She asked, worried and Harry stumbled all over himself to correct her.

 

“Not immediately, I just wanted to tell you that the house is yours to stay in for the next six months but after that, I’m afraid the friend has a tenant line dup.” She all but sagged in relief, and it wasn’t until then that Harry released how scared she really must have been. “But I haven’t managed to sell the locket yet and-”

 

“It’s okay,” She said, a strength in her voice that wasn’t there before. “You’ve been kinder to me than I deserve but I’d rather pay you back the money and keep the locket. My child should have something of our family legacy.”

 

Harry was impressed. It  was more than he could have hoped for honestly. He hadn’t been optimistic about MErope is he was honest with himself. Had expected to have to leave Tom at the orphanage again after giving him the potion for 7 days. Merope, when he’d seen her in all those memories, had seemed like a mist, dissipating easily, too in love with a man who’d never love her back to have the will to live. 

 

But then again, remembering her home, the Gaunts, she’d never been shown any sort of ‘random’ act of kindness, had she? There was a bit of guilt in Harry now, rising steadily, after all his kindness isn't very random either. It was tempered though, with the realisation that this was still the same woman who’d fed Amortentia to a man who’d publicly claimed his disdain for her, and forced him into a marriage and more with her. But, who was he to deny her a second chance, especially since it meant his life got a bit easier. It would be interesting too, to see how Tom fared as a boy who knew of the wizarding world.

 

So, when she asked him what she owed him, he named  a price much lower than original. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the galleons to spare, after all. He wondered exactly how she’d pay him though and that doubt had him sticking around for a while in his animagus form, observing, watching.

 

Still, one week after Tom’s birth he found her busy at work in the potion’s laboratory in the house, using the ingredients she foraged from the garden in the house to start her own owl-order based potions service. Through the ventilation window in the the side of the potions lab he watched and she fed Tom the Amordeditia for a week, crooning all along about her darling boy. 

 

So it was that in the early days of 1927, Harry Potter flew off and ran away from Wizarding Britain.

 

He did have other things to do, after all.

  
  


 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say that this is genuinely the most unrealistic chapter I have ever written. Merope does a huge turnaround in becoming a redeemed character but seriously, Hogwarts actually existing is more likely than the change she's had. People do not magically become better people just because they have children. In Merope's case particularly, I do not think she has ever had the insight into just how unhealthy her attachment patterns are, to ever change them in the first place. In reality I have no doubt she would adore Tom as an extension of his father and little more, and is more likely to use him to worm her way back into Tom Riddle sr's life than to be a better person because she's become a mother. The sort of change she's had is the 'years and years of therapy; type of change, 'having a supportive environment that reinforces those healthy changes', type of change. It is simply impossible. 
> 
> I know I write Tom himself as being a more sane and redeemed character in my other stories but the thing is, with horcruxes being involved there is a legit suspension of disbelief that happens in my head as I hypothesise as to what the possible effect of the magics Tom practices may have on his psyche. Merope's actions on the other hand have little to no magic guiding them. 
> 
> Headcanon added two minutes before posting chapter:So you know what, let's just work under the assumption that when taking Tom for his vaccinations she got herself a mind healer and that magic fixed her personality up.

* * *

 

 

~2~ 

 

There were times when Merope was jealous of her son. Times when magic came to him with an ease that she had never seen before. But the envy was overshadowed by the sheer _awe_.

 

Because she had _never_ seen magic done the way Tom did. Wandless, wordless and with such deliberation to it, such intent. All the many books that had been her sole companion, her only road to magic, had told her that what he did was nigh impossible. But then, that was so very much like her son. Impossible.

 

And such a darling.

 

Because she had never really understood that his magic wasn’t accidental the way children’s was supposed to be but driven by his desires until he came to her with blossoms of night blooming cereus, the ones that only bloomed once a year that she had lamented missing. He had handed it to her with a gruff little ‘Mother, you should finish the potion’.

 

Her _darling_ boy.

 

So, yes, sometimes she was jealous of her boy, sometimes she was awed. But all these were overshadowed by that anticipatory fear that once he’d go to Hogwarts she’d lose her darling.

 

It was a fear she hadn’t had before. She’d never had love in the Gaunt shack and the perverted ‘love’ she had forced out of Thomas Riddle Sr wasn’t something she’d been afraid of losing either, too certain and confident in the wake of how the potions had made him so affectionate to her.

 

But Tom loved her. And he was the only person who ever had. She agonised over losing him, even as she saved galleons and sickles in anticipation of his Hogwarts needs. She knew couldn’t keep him tied to her forever, couldn’t force him to stay. She’d learnt that lesson well enough and had no intention of repeating it. She could let him go and hope against all hope that he would return.

 

The letter came on a rich parchment, written in green ink. Beautiful and something she had never thought she’d see in her lifetime. Tom opened it carefully, unfolding the paper and tugging at it with his magic until it was perfectly flat before he read it, as he always did.  

 

With trepidation she went to Diagon Alley with him. Sat on a little stool and gasped as sparks came out of the yew and phoenix feather wand. Got a trunk and books secondhand from a little store in Knockturn, a prospect that Tom thankfully enjoyed, looking forward to unfolding all the dog eared pages of the books to perfectly flat edges. From a muggle shop she bought black fabric and in between brewing potions, Merope sewed Tom’s robes, embroidering his name in neat little stitches at the collar.

 

And the night before he was to board the Hogwarts express, Merope cried as quietly as she could in her bed and woke to Tom sleeping next to her, a hand awkwardly looped around her wrist.

 

Her little baby was all grown up.

 

* * *

 

Slytherin house was stagnating. So were all the houses, of course, but Slytherin in particular had been unchanged for far too long. It annoyed Tom beyond belief. He was venerated for the Gaunt lineage and eschewed for his muggle heritage. His fellow housemates looked at him with respect for his mother’s former last name and parseltongue, and loathing for his blood. He had every intention of changing that.

 

Soon, he decided, they would learn to respect and apprehend him for his magic.

 

Tom didn’t understand blood prejudice. After all, he himself was a half blood and more powerful than most. His mother was considered a ‘disgraceful’ squib and yet her potions could destroy legacies. It didn’t make sense. What was the point of harping on about blood when there was no ability to back it up?

 

For a moment though, Tom had considered pretending otherwise. Pretending that he loathed his muggle father whoever he may be, that blood mattered to him and that he hated the muggle world. For a moment he considered it, knowing very well that all the changes he wants to bring about would far easier if the Blacks, the Malfoys and the Lestranges etc, were to support him.

 

But a moment in their presence and he left all those thoughts behind. To simper and pretend that Abraxas’ boasting means something to him when the boy did little more than throw his name around, spending more time perfecting his hair than his spells, to act as if Walburga’s hysterical madness was just her being ‘energetic’, that the Lestrange heir, Falco, was just a bit befuddled, rather than inbred and slow.

 

It was just as well, though, he wasn’t very good at pretending. He knew how to do it in his mind but when it came to putting it into practice he failed rather dreadfully. In the beginning he had tried to fit in, his mother had told him he’d make friends and so he tried. But the more he tried the more he failed. He gave up on that endeavour entirely and focused on his studies and when that happened, they flocked to him.

 

If only they weren’t so bloody _irritating_!

 

Besides, Tom had work to do. Squibs like his mother weren’t allowed much in way of power in their world. If she was, she would have lifted the Gaunt name to prominence already but instead it was his uncle, the infamous Morfin who was associated with it instead. All because when he waved a wand it worked. His mother had a wand too, one passed down from mother to child but it only helped a bit when ti came to potion making.

 

But how? How could it be that she had only enough magic to make powerful potions but not enough to have it come out of her? What made a squib a  squib in the first place? How were they magical enough to see through notice-me-nots made to keep away muggles and other folk without magic but not magical enough to count as witches and wizards? It didn’t make sense and Tom needed to know more.

 

So he ignored the simpering masses and made good on the vastness of the Hogwarts library. Oh, Dumbledore could be suspicious of him all he wanted, but Tom couldn’t be stopped for being curious, after all. Honestly, he was fairly sure that whatever Dumbledore was bound to be telling Dippet about Tom was only making him look worse, he could see the concerned looks being thrown Tom’s way when Dumbledore was in his vicinity.

 

Besides, he’d been expecting that. Even his mother had been, ever since Dumbledore had come to their house to lend a helping hand, under the impression that he was a muggleborn child. Tom and his mother speaking to one another in parseltongue had rid him of those thoughts but he’d made mention of a previous student of his and Morfin Gaunt. When his mother had blanched terribly at the mention of it, Tom had all but commanded Dumbledore to get out of their house and Dumbledore had inevitable taken offense to that.

 

Fool.

 

Because all the other teachers liked Tom well enough. Sometimes he got scolded for his lack of patience with the other students, particularly in paired assignments. But when they realised how far ahead he was they helped him in other ways, gave him more advanced assignments so that he wouldn’t get bored.

 

His favourite teacher was Professor Keegan, who taught Magical theory. It was an optional class, not one he’d be able to take until his third year, but she’d found him checking out the same books she used for her classes and ended up talking to him.

 

So his year went on. He was fond of Hogwarts especially its library, but missed his mother. The day after Samhain he sat in the Great Hall writing her a letter of the rites Slytherin house had conducted when owls carrying letters and the newspapers swooped down and the cacophony grew too loud. He looked up from the parchment to see Slytherin house looking rather grey faced while Dumbledore himself looked like he would throw up. It gave him some pause, he’d never in his months at Hogwarts seen Slytherins and Dumbledore have the same reaction. It grew even more suspicious when he turned to see the other house tables near crying with happiness, people hugging on another while the other staff members beamed at one another. Finally Tom turned to look at the copy of the Daily Prophet that had left Walburga's slackened and trembling grasp.

 

“Grindelwald defeated!” claimed the headline and Tom was surprised. From what he’d heard Grindelwald had been a strong presence in international magical affairs since the last decade or so although he’d avoided Wizarding Britain for some reason.

 

“I can’t believe it!”an ashen Abraxas announced. “Grindelwald gone. And defeated by some unknown man too. Father always said that if Grindelwald was ever going to be stopped it would be by Dumbledore, that there couldn’t be another wizard who was his equal.”

 

How odd. Was that the reason Dumbledore looked so grey? Because his victory had been stolen from him? Looking over the sparse bit of information in the article, Tom saw there was little to nothing about Grindelwald’s defeater. Only that he’d appeared out of nowhere and taken Grindelwald’s wand from him before defeating him a duel unlike anything ever seen. More details would be forthcoming but at the moment, the Wizarding world was saved.

 

“Strange.” Tom said before shaking himself out of the thought. He put the newspaper in front of Walburga again and went back to writing that letter to his mum. He had even more to tell her now.

 


End file.
